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Lost in Translation : The Brits often assume that Germans have no sense of humour. In truth, writes comedian Stewart Lee, it’s a language problem. The peculiarities of German sentence construction simply rule out the lazy set-ups that British comics rely on …

Last week I started subscribing to Mikhail Epshtein’s weekly lexicon, ??? ?????. It seems to be on semi-hiatus for the summer and all issues, which will be released bi-weekly until August, contain ‘repeats’ of material from the archive. However, the archives are all available online and are useful browsing material for a slow day.

The latest issue has the following tidbit on compound nouns with zen:

????

? ???? ??????? ?????? ?????? ??????? ??????????????? ? ?????? ?????? ???? (????. “??????????????”, “?????????”). ??? ????????, ????-??????? - ??????????? ? ????????, ??? ???????? ??????????? ????????? ????????????? ? ????????? ???????? ??? ?????????????? ?????????????, ????????? ???????? (??????) ? ?.?.

???? - ?????? ????? ??????? ????; ???????? ??????, ????????, ?????????????, ????????, ?????????????? ???????, ???????? ?????? ?????????, ? ?.?.

????-?????? - ?????? ?? ????????, ????? ?????? ?????? ????????.

????-?????? - ??????????? ???????? ??? ?????????? (? ?????? ?????).

????-???????? - ????????, ?? ???????, ????? ????, ????? ?? ??????.

????-??????? - ???????? ???????, ????? ??????? ????????????? ??? ??? ??? ??????????.

Interesting, but it’s the first time I’ve heard any of these words. I’m sure I’m not the only one either, because Google doesn’t give a single hit besides the original text and a few direct quotations of it. The article was first printed in September 2004 and it seems to me that in the two years since then the situations in which these words could occur would have become more frequent. Nonetheless, none of these neologisms have caught on… So why does Epshtein include these zen words as ‘most worthy of our attention’? Got me.

As I assumed, at least several of these neologisms are calques from English. Zenmail was entered into the WordSpy database back in 1997. Zen-advertising (in English) seems to be a slightly different story as people are using it in several different ways. For example, An online gamer site uses it to mean nothing more than minimalist advertising, while a science-fiction fansite uses it to describe unintentionally blank advertising from Google.

I like Epstein’s defintion above: advertising in which it is unclear what product is being advertised or how to go about getting it. Though people may not be calling it such, zen-advertising has been all over Moscow in the last few years, most notably in the huge rebranding campaigns of mobile-phone service providers MTS and Beeline. I think the concept is quite ingenious; the mysterious ads had me thinking of the products for much longer than traditional billboards. I guess Megafon’s in line next for a massive rebranding.

Anyway, have you heard these words either in Russian or English? Have I just been living in a cave?

While browsing through NPR’s podcasts, I came upon a great column by American poet, translator, and etymologist John Ciardi. Mr. Ciardi passed away in 1986, but in the last 8 years of his life he hosted a segment on NPR called On Words. The program explored etymologies of words and phrases, one of Ciardi’s greatest passions. Last year NPR began making the audio available as a weekly podcast.

This was a great discovery for me, as word etymologies can keep me up at night. I really enjoyed the recent program on the origin of hodge-podge:

Let’s start with Spanish olla podrida, literally ‘rotten pot’. From olla (pot, stew pot) and podrida (rotten). In effect, olla podrida is a folk name for a thick stew made of mixed up everything: fish, flesh, foul, and vegetable all hashed up together. In translation, olla podrida became French potpourri, which also means ‘rotten pot’ and also describes a stew made up of everything inside. But it also has come to mean, as potpourri does in English, ‘any miscellanious gathering’, for example: a potpourri of stories, poems, and literary fragments.

In Scottish, this stew began as a hotchtpot. Hotch here is a variant of hatch, hatched, hash, ergo a pot into which everything has been hashed up together. Whereupon the word became a language form known as a reduplication, and so: hotch-potch. Or, in the more common American variant, hodge-podge.

Interesting. Especially how potpourri might be more likely now to refer to a pleasant fragrance of dried flowers, when it really comes from the idea of rotting. By the way, apparently the closest concept to hodge-podge in Russian is either ?????? or ????????; though they refer to a miscellany and have nothing to do with stew, as far as I know. Russians can use ??????? in the same sense that we do too. Oh, and you can read more about reduplications at Wikipedia if you’re interested.

I’ve also been checking out some of Ciardi’s poetry. Here’s my favourite so far:

True or False
Real emeralds are worth more than synthetics
but the only way to tell one from the other
is to heat them to a stated temperature,
then tap. When it’s done properly
the real one shatters.
I have no emeralds.
I was told this about them by a woman
who said someone had told her: True or false,
I have held my own palmful of bright breakage
from a truth too late. I know the principle.

The Simplified Spelling Society has a page with some poems that humorously illustrate the difficulties of English phonetics.

?????? ?????? ???????, ? ?? ???? ??????.

My fellow students of the Russian language and lovers of all things Russian may enjoy this online archive of Soviet cartoons. They’ve got quite a bit of everything there. For starters, try Nu pogodi.

A great comic illustrates the importance of proper hyphen placement (via LanguageHat)

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